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EDITED BY 

AMBROSE WHITE VERNON 



THE HISTORICAL AND 
RELIGIOUS VALUE OF 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 



BY 



ERNEST F. SCOTT, D. D. 

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, 
KINGSTON, CANADA 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

@bz ftitter^iiie $u& Cambridge 

1909 



3^ ,6r 
$3* 



COPYRIGHT, I9O9, BY ERNEST F. SCOTT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October, iqog 



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CONTENTS 




I. 


Introductory 


i 


II. 


Authorship 


5 


III. 


General Characteristics 


i5 


IV. 


Subordinate Aims 


19 



V. New Presentation of Christianity 28 

VI. The Logos 33 

VII. The Death of Christ 41 

VIII. Light and Life 46 

IX. Man's Relation to the Life-Giver 57 

X. The Eternal Christ 66 

XL Permanent Value of the Gospel 75 



THE HISTORICAL AND 

RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE 

FOURTH GOSPEL 

I. INTRODUCTORY 

Every reader of the New Testament is 
conscious of a difference when he passes 
from the first three Gospels to the Gospel 
of John. The earlier Gospels are distinct in 
character from one another, and are some- 
times at variance in their record of facts; 
but they all present the same general pic- 
ture of our Lord's life and teaching. They 
are termed the "Synoptic Gospels/' since 
they deal substantially with a common ma- 
terial from a common point of view. The 
fourth evangelist, like the other three, is 
concerned with the life of Jesus, and repro- 
duces the familiar story in its main outline 

i 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

and in many of its more striking details. 
But we feel at once that the portrait is 
different. Our Lord as he appears in the 
fourth Gospel is no longer a prophet and 
teacher, but the manifest Son of God. He 
speaks not in vivid saying and parable, but 
in the language of a mystical theology. The 
message of the Kingdom, which forms the 
one subject of his teaching in the Synoptic 
Gospels, falls practically out of sight, and 
our attention is fixed instead on his own 
personality, in its relation to God and its 
significance for the world. We discover, 
on closer examination, that this Gospel 
differs from the others, not only in its gen- 
eral view of the nature of Christ's mission, 
but in its reading of the history itself. The 
chief scene of our Lord's ministry, which 
was Galilee according to the Synoptic re- 
cords, is placed in Jerusalem. The time 
covered by the ministry is extended from 
one year to three. Important incidents are 

2 



INTRODUCTORY 

transposed into a new setting; or they are 
omitted altogether, while others, unknown 
to the previous Gospels, take their place. 
Even where the fourth evangelist is in 
closest agreement with the Synoptists, he 
never fails to introduce some modification 
in detail, often of such a nature as to change 
the whole meaning of the event. 

These peculiarities in the Gospel are all 
the more difficult to explain in view of the 
traditional theory of its authorship. There 
can be no doubt that the Synoptic records, 
on the face of them, bear more convincing 
marks of authenticity. They describe the 
incidents of our Lord's life in a natural se- 
quence, and set them in intelligible relation 
to well-known facts of contemporary Jew- 
ish history. Their account of his works and 
sayings is consistent and life-like, and seems 
to embody the reminiscences of actual eye- 
witnesses. A thoughtful reader who stud- 
ied the Gospels for the first time, with 

3 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

nothing to guide him but his own impres- 
sions, would almost certainly conclude that 
the Synoptists gave him the facts, while in 
John the facts were interpreted and ideal- 
ised. But this judgment which we should 
otherwise pass with little hesitation, has 
been complicated by the generally ac- 
cepted view of the authorship of the Fourth 
Gospel. In the epilogue with which it closes 
it is expressly assigned to the "beloved 
disciple" of Jesus, — the disciple who has 
been identified, from a very early time, 
with John the son of Zebedee. If we admit 
this evidence as to its origin, we have little 
choice but to grant it a higher claim to 
authenticity than any of the other Gospels. 
It comes to us, not as a comparatively late 
compilation, woven out of stray fragments 
of surviving tradition, but as a first-hand 
narrative of the life of Jesus, written by 
that disciple who knew him best. 



AUTHORSHIP 

II. AUTHORSHIP 

In modern times the authorship of the 
fourth Gospel has been the subject of rig- 
orous investigation. The discussion has 
now been in process for nearly a hundred 
years, and is by no means closed; but the 
weight of scholarly opinion is settling down 
to a conviction that the traditional theory 
must be abandoned. It is not the purpose 
of this little book to deal with the "Johan- 
nine problem/' the most involved and diffi- 
cult of all the problems which have arisen 
out of the critical study of the New Testa- 
ment. A few sentences, however, will be 
enough to indicate at least the main reasons 
for the conclusion that the author of this 
Gospel was not the Apostle John. 

(i) The book itself makes no claim to 
Apostolic authorship. It is now generally 
agreed that the closing chapter, in which 
alone such a claim is suggested, is of the 

5 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

nature of an appendix, added by a different 
hand to the original work. This is obviously 
true of the concluding verses of the chap- 
ter. They purport to be written not by the 
author himself, but by some body of wit- 
nesses, who set their imprimatur on his 
book. The appendix was no doubt added 
at an early date ; but we cannot infer with 
any certainty that its account of the origin 
of the Gospel is more than conjectural. 
There would indeed have been no occa- 
sion for the calling in of witnesses, if the 
authorship had been definitely known from 
the beginning. In any case, it is noticeable 
that the Gospel is assigned, in general 
terms, to a beloved disciple. The writer 
of the appendix seems to find this disciple 
in John the son of Zebedee, but guards 
himself against any express identification. 

(2) The external evidence for the Jo- 
hannine authorship is far from conclusive. 
It ultimately rests on the testimony of Ire- 

6 



AUTHORSHIP 

naeus, toward the end of the second century, 
and there are reasons for supposing that 
he confused the Apostle John with another 
John, who was a prominent figure in the 
early history of the church in Asia Minor, 
Traces of an acquaintance with the Gospel 
can be discovered in patristic literature be- 
fore the time of Irenaeus; but these prove 
at most that the work was current at 
an earlier date than has sometimes been 
granted. If the Apostolic authorship was 
matter of common knowledge, we should 
doubtless have found constant reference to 
the Gospel in the literature of the second 
century. As it is, the few vague quotations 
and reminiscences which prove its exist- 
ence, seem also to indicate that it held a 
subordinate place among the scriptures of 
the church. The tradition that John wrote 
our Gospel has therefore little evidence to 
support it; and we have further to reckon 
with a counter-tradition. It is known that 

7 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

at least one sect in the early church refused 
to admit the Johannine authorship. Little 
is told us about this sect or the grounds on 
which it took up its position; but we may 
reasonably infer, from the mere fact of its 
appearance, that the Gospel established itself 
with some difficulty. Its origin was involved 
in obscurity; and the church consented 
slowly, and not without misgiving, to ac- 
cept it as the work of John. 

(3) The relation of the fourth Gospel 
to the other three is of such a nature that 
we cannot well conceive the possibility of 
Johannine authorship. On the one hand, 
as we have seen, the Synoptic account is 
greatly modified, alike in its general fea- 
tures and in details. An eye-witness of the 
events could hardly have allowed himself 
those many departures from what, to all 
appearance, is the correct historical tradi- 
tion. On the other hand, the fourth evan- 
gelist, while he modifies the Synoptic 

8 



AUTHORSHIP 

account, is manifestly dependent on it 
throughout. Again and again he borrows 
the very words of his predecessors. Al- 
most all the incidents he records are de- 
rived, more or less obviously, from the 
Synoptic narrative. Even where he appears 
to have least in common with the other 
evangelists, we can usually discover that 
he is working on some suggestion which 
they have offered him. An apostle who 
had his own store of personal reminiscence 
from which to draw, would not have leaned 
in this manner on written documents; and 
there seems to be no escape from the con- 
clusion that the fourth evangelist was not 
one of the original witnesses of the life of 
Jesus, but a later, derivative writer. His 
divergences from the Synoptic record are 
to be explained by his remoteness from the 
facts which he describes. He is no longer 
in a position to see the life of Jesus in its 
historical surroundings and under its true 

9 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

character as a human life. The events have 
all receded into the distance, so that he is 
free to deal with them imaginatively, in 
their ideal and spiritual import. 

(4) The crucial argument against the 
traditional theory is to be found in the in- 
ternal character of the Gospel. Its portrait 
of Jesus is dominated by certain concep- 
tions of his work and nature which were 
not possible to a thinker of the primitive 
age. The evangelist has steeped himself 
in the teaching of Paul. He has combined 
the Pauline speculations with those of Alex- 
andrian philosophy. His mind is set, not so 
much on the literal facts of his narrative, 
as on the meanings which had been at- 
tached to them in the light of subsequent 
doctrine. Now it may fairly be maintained 
that an aged apostle, after a life-time of 
deep Christian experience, would be filled 
with a sense of the divine significance of 
the events which he had witnessed. His 

10 



AUTHORSHIP 

remembrance of them would be inter- 
woven, almost unconsciously, with the 
thoughts and surmises they had awakened 
in him long afterwards. But in the fourth 
Gospel we have something more than this 
natural blending of memory and reflec- 
tion. The history is subordinated to the 
theology. The writer appears to value it 
chiefly as a proof and illustration of the 
doctrinal ideas with which he approaches 
it. We cannot believe that one who had 
known Jesus in the flesh, and who had 
been nearer to him than any other, would 
thus have presented the Master's life. His 
reflections on the meaning of the life could 
never have displaced his interest in the life 
itself. As it is, the Gospel is the work of 
a great religious thinker, who has entered 
profoundly into spiritual fellowship with 
Christ. But it lacks the warm colours and 
the definite outlines of personal reminis- 
cence. The evangelist, like Paul, is "one 

ii 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

born out of due time/' who has not wit- 
nessed the earthly life of Jesus except 
through the eyes of others. 

The fourth Gospel, therefore, cannot be 
attributed to the Apostle John, and the real 
secret of its authorship seems to be irre- 
coverably lost. Many attempts have been 
made in recent times to connect it with 
some particular name ; but with our scanty 
knowledge of the early history of the 
church, they are hazardous at the best. 
The evangelist himself remains unknown. 
All that we can do is to distinguish, within 
certain limits, the place and time in which 
he composed his work. From various in- 
dications, both internal and external, we 
can infer that he belonged to Asia Minor, 
and probably to the region of Ephesus. 
His date has been much disputed; but the 
evidence would seem to point, more and 
more decisively, to some time within the 
first two decades of the second century. 

12 



AUTHORSHIP 

Though considerably later than the Synop- 
tic records, the fourth Gospel is thus an 
early work, removed by only one genera- 
tion from the Apostolic Age. It is even 
possible that the Gospel as we have it was 
based on an earlier writing, in which case 
its original sections would fall within the 
first century. This opinion is held by sev- 
eral notable scholars in our day; but in 
view of the uniform character of the work, 
alike in its language and its teaching, 
it must be regarded as more than doubt- 
ful. 

The early date of the Gospel must be 
taken into account before we refuse it any 
value as a historical document. At a period 
when men were still living who had listened 
to the Apostles, many recollections of the 
life of Christ must have been current in 
the church. The evangelist would doubt- 
less make use of the oral tradition, as he 
did of the written record. There are several 

13 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

historical questions of capital importance 
(e. g., the length of our Lord's ministry, 
the procedure followed at the trial, the 
date of the Crucifixion) in which the evi- 
dence of the fourth Gospel seems prefer- 
able to that of the other three. It is by no 
means improbable that the writer had ac- 
cess to sources of information which en- 
abled him to correct or supplement the 
account of the Synoptists. From the same 
sources he may have derived not a few of 
the sayings and incidents which are pecul- 
iar to himself, and which have been set 
down, too hastily, as free additions. Allow- 
ing, however, for all this possible use of 
authentic material, we cannot unreservedly 
accept the testimony of the fourth Gospel 
on any matter of historical fact. It is evi- 
dent that all the material has undergone a 
process. From whatever source he derived 
it, — whether from our Synoptic Gospels or 
from other traditions, equally trustworthy, 

H 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

— the writer has moulded it anew and 
brought it into harmony with his own con- 
ceptions. What we have before us now is 
not the literal history of our Lord's life, but 
the Johannine interpretation of that life. 

III. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

The process to which the history has 
been subjected will be better understood, 
if we look briefly at two outstanding charac- 
teristics of the Gospel. 

(i) In the first place, the writer views all 
the facts not as they are in themselves, but 
through an atmosphere of symbolism. It was 
already observed by Clement of Alexandria, 
at the beginning of the third century, that 
"since the bodily things had been exhibited 
in the other Gospels, John, inspired by the 
Spirit, produced a spiritual Gospel." This 
"spiritualising" of the history is manifestly 
his aim throughout. Impressed by the infi- 
nite significance of the revelation in Christ, 

*5 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

he sees a deeper meaning in all the exter- 
nal incidents. He presents them in such a 
manner that the fact becomes the transpar- 
ent veil of some inward religious idea. The 
symbolic value which is thus attached to 
the life of Jesus can be discerned most 
clearly in the case of the miracles. As the 
evangelist regards them they are not 
merely works of power or beneficence, but 
"signs," pointing to some truth beyond 
themselves; and his account of each of 
them is followed by a discourse, in which 
this deeper truth is expounded. We are 
meant to understand that the actual deed 
of miracle was only the expression, under 
a visible type, of something that has an 
abiding reality in the spiritual world. In 
like manner all the circumstances of the 
life of Christ — down even to accidental 
details — were of the nature of signs. 
Names of places, numbers, casual coinci- 
dences, are carefully recorded, in order to 

16 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

draw attention to the hidden import sug- 
gested by them. The history resolves itself 
at every point into a kind of allegory which 
cannot be rightly apprehended without a 
key. In this way we must explain the lib- 
erties^ strange to our modern mind, which 
the writer continually takes with historical 
facts. The event as it happened was to him 
the adumbration, necessarily dim and im- 
perfect, of a spiritual idea. His interest is 
in the idea, which he regards as the one es- 
sential thing, — the " truth v or inward re- 
ality of the fact. He thinks it not only per- 
missible but necessary to modify the fact, 
so as to bring out more fully or emphati- 
cally the idea at the heart of it. "Lo, now 
speakest thou plainly, and speakest no 
parable," say the disciples to Jesus at the 
Last Supper. 1 The evangelist here ex- 
presses the thought which has guided him 
constantly in the writing of his Gospel. 

1 xvi : 29. 

17 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

He has taken the earthly life of Jesus as a 
great " parable/' and seeks to make it in- 
telligible, in its infinite significance for all 
time. 

(2) In estimating the historical character 
of the Gospel we must further bear in mind 
that it is written with a deliberate purpose. 
Although cast in the mould of a biography 
of Jesus, it is not, like the other Gospels, a 
simple narrative of events. The evangelist 
himself declares, in the verse which origi- 
nally closed his work, that he had kept an 
aim before him. " These things are written 
that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, 
the Son of God, and that believing ye might 
have life through his name." 1 In other 
words, we have here a history which is 
meant to illustrate and support a given re- 
ligious belief. We are prepared to find that 
the facts as recorded are all brought into cor- 
respondence with that belief. Consciously 

1 xx : 31. 

18 



SUBORDINATE AIMS 

or not, the writer so adjusts and colours 
them as to bear out his own conception of 
the Person and work of Christ. 

IV. SUBORDINATE AIMS 

The Gospel is confessedly written with 
an intention, and we are justified in enquir- 
ing whether the declared religious intention 
may not be combined with some other. The 
beginning of the second century was one 
of the critical periods in the history of the 
church; and it may fairly be expected that 
a work written about that time will have 
a bearing on the needs and problems which 
were occupying the minds of Christian men. 
When we look below the surface of the 
fourth Gospel we seem to discover clear 
traces of this interest in the contemporary life 
of the church. Several of the more striking 
peculiarities of the Gospel are not capable 
of explanation until we read it not only as a 
history of Jesus, but as a"tractfor the times," 

J 9 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

called forth by the practical requirements 
of the second century. 

(i) A number of chapters are devoted 
almost entirely to controversy, — our Lord 
asserting his claims in face of the antago- 
nism of "the Jews." This substitution of the 
nation generally for the " scribes and Phari- 
sees " of the earlier Gospels is itself strange; 
and our surprise is still greater when we 
examine into the nature of the controversy. 
It turns, not as in the other records, on 
matters of Jewish custom and morality, but 
on doctrinal questions which first came 
under discussion at a later time. Jesus meets 
objections which the Jews bring forward 
against his unity with God, his preexist- 
ence, the character of his Messianic work, 
the partaking of his flesh and blood, the 
apparent failure of his mission. We have 
here to do not with the conflict between 
Jesus and his enemies, but with the conflict 
between Christianity and Judaism. The 

20 



SUBORDINATE AIMS 

objections answered are precisely those 
which were urged by the Jews against the 
rival religion: they meet us continually, 
under various forms, in the controversial 
works of the second century. It is impos- 
sible to avoid the inference that the evan- 
gelist, writing at a time when the synagogue 
was in strong opposition to ' the church, 
took occasion to read back into the past 
the conflict of the present. His Gospel be- 
came, in one of its aspects, a reply to the 
Jewish antagonists, whose arguments were 
more dangerous than any others to the pro- 
gress of the Christian mission. 

(2) Another remarkable feature in the 
Gospel is its attitude to John the Baptist. 
John ceases to be the preacher of righteous- 
ness whom we read of in the Synoptic nar- 
ratives, and is simply a witness to the Light. 
He foretells the advent of Jesus, and is the 
first to recognise him. When once he has 
welcomed and proclaimed him, he feels 

21 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

that his own vocation is ended, and with- 
draws from the scene. The greatness of 
John is generously acknowledged, yet there 
is an obvious anxiety to subordinate him 
to Jesus, — an anxiety which to our minds 
seems superfluous. It only becomes intel- 
ligible when we remember that John was 
the founder of a sect, which continued in 
being long after his death, and which ap- 
parently came into conflict with the Chris- 
tian Church. The evangelist had in his mind 
not only the historical John, but this Baptist 
party. He sought to refute their extrava- 
gant claims on behalf of their master, — 
possibly also to win them over, like John's 
first disciples, to the allegiance of Christ. 

(3) A farther controversial aim may be 
traced in the Gospel. We know that the First 
Epistle of John — a kindred writing, which 
comes to us from the same school, if not 
from the same hand — is directed against 
certain heretical teachers. These appear to 

22 



SUBORDINATE AIMS 

have been precursors of the later Gnostics, 
who denied the reality of Christ's appear- 
ance and death, and sought to resolve his 
message into a vague philosophical system. 
It is highly probable that the same type of 
heretical teaching is combated in the Gos- 
pel. The writer goes back to the earthly 
life of Jesus, and follows it step by step 
through its earthly progress. He lays stress 
on details which serve to illustrate the Lord's 
humanity. He offers solemn testimony to 
the material fact of the death upon the Cross. 1 
The whole Gospel centres on the thesis that 
the Word was made flesh, — that the divine 
nature has imparted itself to men through 
a human life. But while the evangelist is 
thus strongly opposed to Gnosticism, there 
is reason to believe that he has himself been 
touched by Gnostic influences. He makes 
frequent use of well-known Gnostic watch- 
words ; he draws a Gnostic distinction be- 

1 xix: 35. 

2 3 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

tween the two classes of men, — the earthly 
and the spiritual, the children of darkness 
and the children of light ; with all his in- 
sistence on the reality of the Saviour's life 
he never loses sight of its ideal significance. 
This twofold attitude to the Gnostic specu- 
lations is one of the chief problems of the 
Gospel. In order to solve it fully we should 
require to know something of the person- 
ality of the writer and of the particular cir- 
cumstances in which he wrote. 

(4) Thus far the Gospel appears to have 
a bearing on specific controversies, which 
agitated the church about the beginning of 
the second century; but we can discern in 
it yet another interest, subordinate to the 
main religious one. Nowhere in the book 
is there express reference to the " church "; 
yet there is no New Testament writing 
which is more impregnated with the eccle- 
siastical idea. Jesus is regarded throughout 
as the founder of a community which was 

24 



SUBORDINATE AIMS 

by and by to overspread the world. The 
disciples whom he calls around him are 
the nucleus and the eventual leaders of this 
community. Rules are laid down for the 
administration of the church ordinances and 
the direction of its government and life. 
The seventeenth chapter more especially — 
the so-called Intercessory Prayer — can 
only be read aright when we consider it as 
a prayer for the future church. Jesus, on the 
point of his departure, looks forward to the 
great brotherhood which would call itself by 
his name, and prays for its unity and peace. 
The apparent universalism of the Gospel 
must be interpreted in the light of this 
church idea which everywhere pervades it. 
There appears, at first sight, to be no writ- 
ing in which the largeness of Christ's mes- 
sage is so fully recognised, and which sets 
forth so absolutely the duty of Christian 
love. But when we look more closely, we 
see that the evangelist was thinking pri- 

25 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

marily of the church, in its opposition to 
" the world." He has done with the exclu- 
siveness that would limit salvation to one 
race or class; but he replaces it by another 
exclusiveness. Jesus " lays down his life for 
his friends." 1 He prays " not for the world, 
but for those whom thou hast given me." 2 
The love so beautifully typified in the 
Lord's act of service at the Supper, is 
" love for one another," — that is, mutual 
love within the Christian community. The 
real universalism of the Sermon on the 
Mount and the parable of the Good Samar- 
itan gives place in the fourth Gospel to a 
narrower message, in accordance with the 
idea of the church. There can be little 
question that the evangelist wrote con- 
sciously in the interest of this idea. Living 
at a time when the unity of the church was 
in danger, and when various abuses were 
creeping into its life and sacraments, he 

1 xv : 13. 2 xvii : 9. 

26 



SUBORDINATE AIMS 

sought to remind it of its true character. 
He reads back into the gospel history the 
conditions of his own day, in order to sub- 
mit them to the Master's judgment. Jesus 
himself becomes the counsellor and legis- 
lator of his church. 

These subordinate motives can all be dis- 
covered in the Gospel, and need to be taken 
into account in any estimate of its historical 
value. Under the form of a biography of 
Jesus it deals with problems and difficulties 
which did not arise until after his death. It 
bears a constant reference not only to the 
events which it narrates, but to the situation 
of the church in the early part of the second 
century. These other motives, however, are 
always subordinate in the writer's mind. 
His paramount aim is the purely religious 
one; "that ye may believe in Jesus as the 
Son of God, and that believing ye may have 
life through his name." 

27 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

V. NEW PRESENTATION OF CHRISTIANITY 

We may now concentrate our attention 
on this supreme religious purpose which 
the fourth evangelist had at heart. His 
teaching is profoundly spiritual, and in its 
essence has little relation to time and his- 
torical circumstance. There can be no key 
to its inmost secret except that of Christian 
experience and faith. But to understand the 
forms in which this permanent message is 
expressed, we must think of the time when 
the Gospel was written and try to realise 
its conditions. The first century had just 
ended, and the new religion was passing 
through the most critical years of its history. 
Hitherto it had been proclaimed by Apos- 
tles or comrades of the Apostles, — men 
who were in immediate contact with the 
personal ministry of Jesus. It had centred 
its message on the enthusiastic hope of an 
imminent return of the Lord to judgment. 

28 



NEW PRESENTATION OF CHRISTIANITY 

While extending its mission through the 
cities of the Gentile world, it had found its 
chief support in Jews and Jewish proselytes, 
to whom the original teaching was directly 
intelligible. But towards the turn of the 
century, all the conditions which had se- 
cured the initial success of Christianity un- 
derwent a change. The high enthusiasm of 
the early days had ebbed away. The last 
links with the Apostolic Age were on the 
point of severing, and the life of Jesus had 
faded into a historical memory. The hope 
of the Lord's coming, which had sustained 
Paul and his fellow labourers had appar- 
ently proved vain. Judaism and Christian- 
ity had come to open quarrel; and the 
younger religion had to seek its future in 
the great Gentile world, to which its beliefs 
and ideals and traditions were all strange. 
It was evident that if the church was to sur- 
vive and to maintain itself as a living power, 
its whole message had to be re-interpreted. 

29 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

Some expression must be found for the rev- 
elation in Christ, which would set it free 
from its mere local and accidental ele- 
ments, and give it a meaning for Gentiles 
in the second century as it had had for Jews 
in the first. Our Gospel was written in 
those years of critical transition. The task 
which the evangelist laid on himself was 
that of interpreting to a new time and trans- 
lating into the terms of a different culture, 
the truth as it was in Christ. 

This task had already, in some measure, 
been attempted by Paul, who had stood out- 
side of the original circle of disciples. In the 
endeavour to explain the Christian message 
to his own mind, and to preach it effectively 
to the Gentile world, he was obliged to 
clothe it in new forms. His faith was di- 
rected not to Jesus as he had lived on earth, 
but to the risen and exalted Christ. He con- 
strued in terms of a theology the truth which 
had been given simply and directly, through 

30 



NEW PRESENTATION OF CHRISTIANITY 

a personal life. The fourth evangelist takes 
up the work of Paul, to whom he is indebted 
for all his main conceptions; but in two im- 
portant respects he advances on the Paul- 
ine teaching, (i) On the one hand he trans- 
fers to Jesus in his lifetime the attributes 
of the glorified Lord. Paul, in his desire to 
emphasise the eternal meaning of the Chris- 
tian revelation, had refused to " know Christ 
after the flesh." The one object of his faith 
was the ever-living Christ, who had now 
thrown off the form of a servant, and had 
declared himself as the Son of God with 
power. But this Pauline gospel, as later 
experience had shown, was fraught with a 
grave danger. It tended to break up the 
identity of the Christ of faith with the his- 
torical Jesus, and to empty the earthly life 
of all value and purpose. In the hands of 
teachers who were less mastered than him- 
self by the genuine Christian idea, the views 
of Paul were already being developed in a 

3 1 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

Gnostic direction. A doctrine of Christ 
was gaining ground which had no relation 
to any historical fact. The fourth evangelist 
seeks to reconcile the Pauline account of 
Christ with that of the Synoptic Gospels. 
He goes back to Jesus as he had actually 
lived among men, and invests him with 
the glory of that exalted Christ whom Paul 
had beheld in vision. Thus the higher sig- 
nificance of the Christian revelation is read 
into the history itself. Jesus in his human 
intercourse with his disciples is no other 
than " the Son of God who is in heaven. " x 
(2) Again, the Christian theology is pre- 
sented in the fourth Gospel under Greek 
forms of thought. Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, 
one of the centres of Greek philosophical 
culture; and a Hellenic influence has been 
traced in not a few of his speculations. But 
the prevailing colour of his thought is Jew- 
ish. He was trained in the Rabbinical 

1 iii : 33- 

3 2 



THE LOGOS 

schools, and borrowed from them the theo- 
logical ideas under which he explained the 
new message. The fourth evangelist — 
though almost certainly a Jew — had en- 
tered deeply into the spirit of Greek philo- 
sophy. In his endeavour to set forth the 
inner meaning of the Christian revelation, 
he discards the Jewish forms, which were 
unintelligible to the wider audience he has 
in view. In a far more radical sense than 
Paul, he re-interprets the message. It is 
translated out of the language in which it 
was originally given into another, which in 
many points was alien to it altogether. 

VI. THE LOGOS 

The evangelist found ready to his hand, 
in the general thought of his time, an idea 
on which he was able to base his new in- 
terpretation. Greek philosophy was chiefly 
represented in the first and second centuries 
by Stoicism; and the central doctrine of 

33 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

Stoicism was that of the Logos, or imma- 
nent Reason of the world. An attempt had 
already been made by Philo, a Jewish 
thinker of Alexandria, to reconcile Greek 
philosophy with the Old Testament on the 
ground of this Stoic doctrine. The Greek 
term " Logos " signifies " word" as well as 
"reason"; and Philo had availed himself 
of this double meaning. Into the Old Testa- 
ment allusions to the creative and revealing 
word of God he had read the philosophical 
conception of the Logos; and had thus 
evolved that theory that within the being of 
God there was a secondary divine principle, 
the Word or Logos, which was His agent 
in the creation and government of the world. 
God Himself was solitary and transcendent, 
of purer eyes than to behold iniquity; but 
He had entered into relation with the world 
of time through that intermediate Power, 
which was one with Him and yet distinct. 
Christian teachers from an early time had 

34 



THE LOGOS 

been drawn to this Alexandrian doctrine, 
more especially as Philo himself had attrib- 
uted a kind of personality to the Logos. 
It was recognised, more and more clearly, 
that the Jewish idea of the Messiah did not 
fully represent the significance of Jesus. He 
was something more than a national deliv- 
erer. He had brought men into fellowship 
with God, in a manner that could not be 
explained by the current Messianic the- 
ology. Paul, though he still speaks of Jesus 
as the Messiah, the " Man from heaven " 
of Rabbinic speculation, is evidently reach- 
ing out towards some higher conception. 
In the Epistle to the Colossians the Logos 
theory of the Person of Christ is plainly 
suggested; and it meets us again, even more 
definitely, in the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
But it was reserved for the fourth evan- 
gelist to complete and to work out in all its 
bearings, the identification of Jesus with 
the Logos. He declares explicitly at the 

35 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

very outset of his Gospel, that the Word 
which had existed from all eternity with 
God, sharing with Him in the divine nature, 
had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. 

It is true that after the prologue with 
which the Gospel opens we have no further 
direct reference to the Word. Jesus hence- 
forth appears as the " Son " or the " Son of 
God"; and from this it has been argued 
that the Logos conception was only an af- 
terthought which has no intrinsic relation 
to the teaching of the Gospel as a whole. 
But a closer analysis seems to remove all 
doubt that the idea of the prologue is car- 
ried out consistently through the entire 
book. Jesus is the Son of God in the sense 
that he is a divine Being, eternally one with 
God. While appearing in the form of man, 
he is endued with divine power and know- 
ledge and majesty. His sojourn on earth is 
only a brief interval in the heavenly life 
which has been his from the beginning and 

36 



THE LOGOS 

to which he presently returns. At the same 
time his distinction from God is brought 
into prominence, as in the philosophical 
doctrine. Though one with God he is subor- 
dinate to Him. He does nothing of him- 
self, but is dependent in all things on the 
Father. 1 All that he possesses has been 
" given" him by the Father, who is greater 
than he. 2 Thus in his picture of the actual 
life of Jesus the evangelist keeps before 
him the philosophical idea, and tries to give 
effect to it, on both its sides. 

A historical life cannot, by the nature of 
things, be interpreted by means of an ab- 
stract philosophical idea. We must needs 
admit that in his endeavour to represent 
Jesus as at once Man and incarnate Logos, 
the evangelist falls into many inconsisten- 
cies. Not only so, but he divests the his- 
torical life of much of its meaning and its 
true grandeur, in order to bring it into con- 

1 v : 19. 2 xiv : 28. 

37 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

formity with the Logos idea. We miss from 
his narrative some of the most striking epi- 
sodes of the Synoptic story, — for example, 
the Baptism, the Temptation, the Agony, 
the Cry from the Cross. These could not 
be reconciled with the theory of the Logos, 
and had therefore to be omitted. No allu- 
sion is made to the intercourse of Jesus 
with publicans and sinners, which seemed 
incompatible with his dignity as the incar- 
nate Son of God. The miracles are re- 
garded simply as " signs " of his supernat- 
ural power and origin; and the motive 
of human compassion, so prominent in 
the other Gospels, falls out of sight. The 
prayers of Jesus cease to be true appeals 
for God's help and guidance. He is himself 
one with the Father, and knows beforehand 
that his prayer is sure of fulfilment. 1 As 
many things are omitted, so there are cer- 
tain features added which impair the hu- 

1 xi : 42. 

38 



THE LOGOS 

man reality of the portrait. Jesus knows 
himself from the beginning to be the Son of 
God, and is so recognised by his disciples. 
His life unfolds itself according to a pre- 
arranged plan, of which no part is hidden 
from him. He preserves an attitude of aloof- 
ness towards those around him, who are of 
different nature from himself. Though he 
has submitted for a time to the trammels of 
earthly circumstance, he is never merely 
passive, but orders his life down to its most 
casual details, and goes to the Cross by his 
own free choice. It is not the life of Jesus 
which is thus set before us, but the history 
of the Logos, who acts by the laws of his 
divine nature, though he has taken on 
himself the form of man. 

We misunderstand the Gospel, however, 
if we regard it merely as the presentation, 
in the guise of history, of an abstract theo- 
logical idea. The idea, when all is said, is 
secondary and external. It is only the in- 

39 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

tellectual form whereby the evangelist tries 
to realise and explain the impression made 
on him by Jesus. As he reflected on that 
divine life, as he discerned what it had been 
to him in the experience of faith, he felt 
that God Himself had come near to men in 
Jesus Christ. All previous conceptions of 
the Saviour's nature and mission seemed 
wholly inadequate, and he had resort to the 
very highest category which the thought of 
the time afforded him. Jesus was no other 
than the eternal Word, — the representa- 
tive and express image of God. Like Paul 
before him the evangelist had been mas- 
tered, in the first instance, by the actual life 
of Jesus ; and his theology, like Paul's, has 
a personal love and faith behind it. The 
Logos doctrine is never so conspicuous 
but we can trace in the writer's mind this 
thought of Jesus; and ever and again the 
remembrance of the living Person breaks 
altogether through the theological concep- 

40 



THE DEATH OF CHRIST 

tion. Most of all in the Supper discourses 
we are brought face to face with Jesus as 
he lived. He is no longer the transcendent 
Logos, aloof from the world while travel- 
ling through it, but the Friend and Master 
who loves his own unto the end. The Gos- 
pel owes its permanent place in the hearts 
of Christian men to this vision of Jesus, in 
his human personality, which lies always in 
the background. We feel, as we read, that 
the abstract theory is only a means to an 
end; and our ultimate impression is one of 
simple love and adoration in the presence 
of a personal life. 

VII. THE DEATH OF CHRIST 

The theology of the fourth Gospel is 
governed throughout by the idea assumed 
in the prologue, that the eternal Word be- 
came flesh. It follows that the redemptive 
work of Christ was achieved through his 
Incarnation. The emphasis is laid not on 

4 1 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

the death, as in Paulinism, but on the life; 
and Jesus can say at the Last Supper, when 
the Cross is still in front of them, " I have 
finished the work which thou gavest me to 
do." ' The Crucifixion was indeed the out- 
standing fact of Christian history, and the 
fourth evangelist, like Paul and the Syn- 
optists, is careful to set it in its due place. 
From the beginning, when John the Bap- 
tist points his disciples to "the Lamb of 
God," the story looks forward to the Cross. 
Jesus is ever mindful of his "hour," and 
the thought of his approaching departure 
gives pathos and meaning to many a solemn 
utterance as well as to the great farewell 
discourses at the Supper. Nevertheless, it 
is apparent that the writer felt a certain dif- 
ficulty in regard to the death. He could 
not omit it, as he had done other incidents, 
or assign it any place except a central one; 
yet it was irreconcilable with his theory 

1 xvii : 4. 

42 



THE DEATH OF CHRIST 

of Christ as the Logos, who could not be 
touched by earthly change or accident 
The Gnostic thinkers were conscious of the 
same difficulty involved in the death of 
Christ, and sought to overcome it by the 
strange theory that he did not really die. 
They maintained either that Simon of Cy- 
rene who bore his Cross was crucified in- 
stead of him, or that his seeming death 
was of the nature of an illusion. The evan- 
gelist, with those false teachers in his view, 
is anxious to remove all doubt concerning 
the historical fact. He declares that "Jesus 
went forth, bearing the cross for himself," x 
and establishes the reality of the death by 
the direct testimony of an eye-witness. 2 
Yet in various ways he endeavours to miti- 
gate, in the interest of his theory, the su- 
preme difficulty of the Cross. He insists, 
as we have seen, on the self-determination 
of Jesus, whose life was not taken from 

1 xix: 17. 2 xix: 35. 

43 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

him, but laid down of his own free will. 
He is at pains to show that the death was 
a necessary episode in the fulfilment of a 
divine plan. In recounting the actual story 
of the Passion he brings into strong relief 
the majesty and authority of Jesus, so that 
instead of a Sufferer we see a King, whose 
apparent humiliation was his " lifting up " 
to the throne of the world. 

The evangelist, then, does not regard the 
death from the point of view of Paul, as the 
great redemptive act in which the life of 
Christ found its issue and explanation. He 
thinks of it rather as something which was 
additional to the life, and which itself had 
to be explained. Sometimes he describes it 
as the sovereign instance of faithfulness to 
duty, 1 or as the crowning example of self- 
sacrificing love. 2 Elsewhere he brings it into 
relation to his favourite idea of Christian 
unity. Around the Cross, as a common 

1 x: ii. 2 xv : 13. 

44 



THE DEATH OF CHRIST 

standard, all the scattered children of God 
are to be gathered into one. 1 But there is 
one interpretation of the death of Christ 
which meets us continually in the Gospel 
and which serves to connect it, in spite of 
apparent difficulties, with the doctrine of 
the Logos. Christ was the Word made 
flesh; and by the assumption of an earthly 
nature he had necessarily placed certain 
limits on his activity. He had revealed 
himself under conditions of space and time, 
and only a chosen few could know him, 
and their knowledge at the best was partial 
and imperfect. By his death, all the limi- 
tations were broken down. He emerged 
from the narrow earthly life into a univer- 
sal life, and could henceforth hold com- 
munion with his people everywhere, as he 
had once done with his immediate disci- 
ples. He was restored to the fulness of his 
preexistent being, while he carried into 

1 xi: 52. 

45 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

it those other attributes he had worn as 
Man. This is the characteristic Johannine 
doctrine of the death of Christ. The re- 
deeming work was fully accomplished in 
the life; but through the death it became a 
lasting and universal possession for men. 
The corn of wheat was cast into the ground 
to die, that it might bring forth much 
fruit. 1 

VIII. LIGHT AND LIFE 

What, then, was that work of Christ 
which he finished in his earthly life and 
which was set free from every limitation 
by his death ? The Gospel offers a twofold 
account of its nature and purpose, (i) In 
the first place, through Christ we have the 
full and ultimate revelation of God. It be- 
longs to the Hellenic cast of the evangelist's 
thinking that a peculiar value is attached to 
the idea of revelation. To the Greek mind 

1 xii : 24. 

46 



LIGHT AND LIFE 

the highest good was identified with per- 
fect knowledge; and for more than five 
centuries the great philosophers had been 
striving after that knowledge. It was as- 
sumed that the " wise man n — the man who 
rightly apprehended the nature of God — 
would raise himself above earthly circum- 
stance, and become, in some measure, like 
God, The evangelist, imbued with this 
Greek idea, declares that God has now 
granted to men the absolute revelation of 
Himself. From the beginning He has been 
found of those who sought Him. In sages, 
prophets, law-givers, His Word has been 
dimly reflected, and men have been led by 
them to some partial knowledge of Him- 
self. But now at last the revealing Word 
has appeared in very Person. The Light 
which in broken rays had been present to 
men from the beginning, had come into the 
world. It was the supreme service of the 
fourth evangelist to Christian thought that 

47 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

he discerned the true revelation of God in 
the living Person of Christ. The objection 
has often been urged against the Gospel 
that it contains little of definite teaching. 
Its elaborate discourses are almost wholly 
occupied with sayings about the speaker 
himself. With all their claim to convey a 
fuller revelation, they have far less to tell 
us of the Heavenly Father, in His love and 
providence and will towards men, than the 
simple Synoptic parables. But it may be 
answered that by concentrating his thought 
upon the Person, almost to the exclusion 
of all else, the evangelist has truly appre- 
hended, and expressed with a matchless 
clearness and power, the truth that un- 
derlies even the Synoptic teaching. Jesus 
himself was the revelation. He made the 
Father known to us, not so much by the 
words he spoke as by his life, by his 
whole personalit}^, "full of grace and 
truth." Our knowledge of God is dependent 

4 8 



LIGHT AND LIFE 

henceforth on an ever-growing vision of 
Jesus Christ. It may be granted that in his 
presentation of this great truth the evangel- 
ist is largely influenced by philosophical 
ideas that obscure much of its meaning. 
He appears to suggest that Jesus revealed 
the Father because He was Himself of the 
same essence, and made palpable to us the 
absolute divine life. A one-sided emphasis 
is laid on "knowledge," as if God were to be 
apprehended through Christ by some intel- 
lectual process. Yet beneath these wrap- 
pings of metaphysic, inseparable from the 
Logos theory, we can discover the simple 
religious idea that Jesus revealed God by 
the divine character of his human life. The 
knowledge by which we lay hold of him 
is something more than intellectual know- 
ledge. It is bound up with obedience to his 
will, and inward fellowship with him. 

(2) The work of Christ, however, did 
not consist wholly in revelation. As he 

49 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

was the Light, he was also the Life, — im- 
parting to men not only the knowledge of 
God, but the divine nature. In this concep- 
tion of Christ as the Life-giver we find the 
central motive of the Gospel. It was written, 
as the evangelist himself tells us, that be- 
lieving in Jesus as the Son of God we might 
have life. 

" Life " is the comprehensive word em- 
ployed in the Old Testament to denote the 
sovereign good. Joy, prosperity, peace, 
wisdom, righteousness, are all summed up 
in the idea of life, and God Himself is pre- 
eminently the " Living One." In later Jew- 
ish thought, life was associated in a special 
manner with the coming age, when all 
things were to reach their consummation. 
The blessings which God would bestow 
upon His people in the great future were 
all included in the one possession of " eternal 
life." It is in this sense that the word meets 
us frequently in the Synoptic Gospels. The 

5° 



LIGHT AND LIFE 

message of Jesus is concerned with the 
coming age, or kingdom of God; but the 
kingdom itself is identified with its chief 
blessing. Jesus can speak, almost in the 
same sentence, of "entering into the king- 
dom "and of " inheriting eternal life." The 
fourth evangelist takes advantage of this 
equivalence of the two terms, and discards 
the idea of the kingdom altogether. It was 
related to hopes and beliefs that were spe- 
cifically Jewish, and he replaces it by the 
more general conception of life. At the 
same time he introduces an all-important 
change into this conception. Life in the 
Synoptic teaching belonged to the inherit- 
ance of the kingdom of God, and was re- 
garded as still in the future. It was described 
as " eternal life," since it was part of that 
divine, eternal order which was presently 
to be inaugurated. But the epithet " eternal," 
as used in the fourth Gospel, applies simply 
to the quality of the life. The natural life is 

5i 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

something defective and unreal, little better 
than a state of death; and over against it 
there is the true life, offered to us by Christ. 
It is not a blessing of the remote future, but 
an actual and present possession. " He that 
believeth in the Son hath life." 1 " He that 
believeth in me is passed " (already by that 
very act) " from death into life." 2 

The evangelist nowhere declares in so 
many words, what he understands by life. 
His apparent definition 3 has reference rather 
to the indispensable means whereby the 
true life is to be attained. In the light of 
various passages, however, his underlying 
thought becomes evident. Life is primarily 
the absolute divine life. God is Spirit, and 
possesses an eternal, self-originated life, of 
a different nature from that of men. This 
higher life is not conceived, at least in the 
first instance, under ethical categories. God 
is the Living One, not in virtue of His love 

1 iii : 36. 2 v : 24. 3 xvii : 3. 

52 



LIGHT AND LIFE 

and righteousness and holiness, but because 
there resides in Him a purer essence, anal- 
ogous to the life principle in man, yet dif- 
ferent in kind. The Logos, as one with God, 
participates in that divine attribute of life. 
" As the Father hath life in himself so he 
hath given the Son to have life in himself." 1 
The purpose of Christ's coming, then, was 
to communicate to men that life which, as 
the eternal Word, he shared with the 
Father. Man was by nature a creature of 
flesh, excluded, by the very conditions of 
his being, from the higher life. But through 
the incarnation of His Son, God had now 
allied Himself with the human race. What 
was formerly an impassable gulf, not to be 
crossed by any effort of man, had been 
bridged over. The higher nature had taken 
possession of the lower, and all who would 
had access to it and could make it their own. 
This, according to the fourth evangelist, 

1 v : 26. 

53 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

was the meaning and end of the Lord's 
sojourn in the flesh. "In him was life," 
and we also can have life through his name. 
Two things need to be observed and em- 
phasised in connection with this primary 
Johannine doctrine, (i) The life, as we 
have seen, is not conceived in a purely 
ethical or religious sense. It is regarded 
from a metaphysical point of view as the 
absolute life which constitutes the being 
of God; and as such it is opposed to the 
mere earthly life which we inherit as men. 
The work of Christ consists, therefore, not 
so much in the renewal of our sinful will as 
in the actual transformation of our nature. 
He communicates the divine life as a kind 
of higher essence, by the reception of which 
man's being is wrought into affinity with 
God's. This mysterious change is symbol- 
ised by the miracle at Cana, — the "begin- 
ning of miracles," which was typical of all the 
others. As Jesus changed water into wine, 

54 



LIGHT AND LIFE 

so he came to transmute our earthly nature 
into something richer and better. It is in- 
dicated, likewise, in the so-called parable 
of the Vine. In more than a figurative sense 
Jesus describes himself as the true Vine, — 
the living stem whereby life is transmitted 
to all the branches. A conception of life 
which can only be defined as semi-physical 
is involved in the whole Johannine doctrine ; 
and in so far it falls short of the highest re- 
ligious value. A magical element is intro- 
duced into Christianity which we cannot 
but recognise as alien to the real spirit of 
our Lord's teaching. None the less, we 
must here again distinguish between the 
truth itself and the form in which it is em- 
bodied. The evangelist is conscious that in 
Jesus Christ a new, transforming power 
has entered into the world. He has seen 
a change effected in the lives of men so 
profound and mysterious that it seems no- 
thing less than a change of nature; and he 

55 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

has himself experienced this inward re- 
newal. To the moral miracle accomplished 
by Jesus he applies the categories suggested 
to him by his philosophical doctrine. Jesus 
was the Word, in whom the being of God 
became incarnate. The possessor of the 
divine life has imparted it to his people, 
changing their mortal nature into the sub- 
stance of his own. 

(2) Life is inseparable from a living 
person; and we can only receive the gift 
of Christ by union with himself. The life 
is in him; not in his teaching, or in any 
work performed by him, but in his very 
self. He can say, " I am the Life." The 
idea thus conveyed brings us directly to 
the heart of the Johannine message. Our 
Lord's purpose, as conceived by this evan- 
gelist, was nothing less than to impart his 
own personal life to his disciples. "I am 
the living bread which came down from 
heaven." "The bread that I will give is 

56 



MAN'S RELATION TO THE LIFE-GIVER 

my flesh, which I will give for the life of 
the world." x Here, also, the thought is no 
doubt obscured by conceptions that to our 
minds may appear crude and half-material. 
The life is viewed as an ethereal essence, 
resident in the incarnate Word; and is only 
to be received by some mystical absorption 
into ourselves of Christ's actual body. Yet 
the truth suggested is the vital truth of 
Christianity, and the fourth Gospel, more 
than any other writing, has established its 
place in the Christian thought of all time. 
Our Lord's great gift to humanity was 
himself, and to receive the gift he offers 
we must apprehend him in his living 
Person. We must fill ourselves with his 
mind and will, and become incorporate 
with him in the whole spirit of our lives. 

IX. MAN'S RELATION TO THE LIFE-GIVER 

The higher life is imparted as an im- 
mediate gift of God through Christ; but 

1 vi:5i. 

57 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

certain conditions are required of men be- 
fore they can receive the gift. To set before 
us these conditions is the practical religious 
aim of the fourth Gospel. It might appear, 
at first sight, as if the evangelist simply 
took up the message of Paul. As Paul in- 
sists on faith as the one thing needful, so 
the later teacher makes the whole process 
of salvation centre on the act of believing 
on Christ. We find, however, on compar- 
ing the two ideas more carefully, that the 
" belief" so persistently demanded in the 
fourth Gospel is something different from 
the Pauline "faith," — something much nar- 
rower and more definite. Its nature is in- 
dicated by the conjunction with "know- 
ledge " in which it is so often placed. Where 
Paul contemplated an energy of the whole 
man, an entire surrender of heart and will, 
the evangelist thinks, in the first instance, 
of an act of intellectual assent. To "be- 
lieve" is to accept the given doctrines of 

58 



MAN'S RELATION TO THE LIFE-GIVER 

Christianity, especially the fundamental 
doctrine that Jesus is the Son of God. 

But while belief in itself has thus a re- 
stricted meaning, it is combined with other 
elements which give it something of the 
larger significance of Faith. We are re- 
minded, on the one hand, that the intel- 
lectual act is morally conditioned. Before 
we can know Christ and recognise him in 
his true character as Son of God, we re- 
quire to enter into full sympathy with 
him; and this sympathy is wrought in us 
by a life of obedience and loyal disciple- 
ship. "If any man will to do His will, he 
shall know of the doctrine." K The promi- 
nence thus given to the ethical demand of 
Christianity is a marked feature in the Gos- 
pel, — all the more striking because of its 
pervading speculative character. Warned, 
perhaps, by the current errors of Gnosti- 
cism, the evangelist feels the danger of re- 

1 vii : 17. 

59 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

solving the message of Christ into a mere 
theology. He holds that the true know- 
ledge runs back in the end to practical 
obedience. 

On the other hand, while belief is repre- 
sented as nothing in its outward form but 
an act of bare confession, an emphasis is 
laid on the mystery involved in it. Through 
belief a man is brought into life-giving fel- 
lowship with the Son of God; and an act 
so momentous in its consequences must be 
the outcome of some profound and divine 
impulse. " No man can come to me unless 
the Father draw him." x The will of God 
Himself must cooperate with the human 
will, before there can be a true belief in 
Christ. This idea of a divine activity re- 
vealing itself in the Christian confession, is 
presented most fully and impressively in 
the doctrine of the New Birth. The doc- 
trine is peculiar to the fourth Gospel, and 

1 vi : 44. 

60 



MAN'S RELATION TO THE LIFE-GIVER 

combines in itself various elements derived 
from Pauline theology and from early spec- 
ulations on the mystical import of the bap- 
tismal rite. But it is ultimately derived 
from the familiar sayings in which our 
Lord declares that men must become like 
little children before they can enter the 
Kingdom of God. The evangelist height- 
ens the original image, and in so doing 
throws a new suggestion into it. He speaks 
not merely of a return to childhood, but 
of a renewal of birth. The acceptance of 
Christianity is nothing less than another 
beginning of life; and this second begin- 
ning, like the first, is mysterious, and not 
dependent on our own will. We are born 
into our faith in Christ by the agency of 
God's spirit, which moves invisibly like 
the wind. Whence it comes, or how it 
works in us, we cannot tell; yet its influ- 
ence, so real though so inscrutable, is the 
beginning of the new life. 

61 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

By the act of belief, therefore, — which it- 
self is preceded by a whole religious process, 
— we enter into such a relation to Christ 
that his gift becomes possible. But the be- 
lief is only the starting-point of another 
process, by which the work of Christ attains 
to its final outcome in eternal life. To un- 
derstand this part of the evangelist's teach- 
ing we need to bear in mind his ruling con- 
ception, that the life bestowed by Christ is 
identical with Christ himself. How can 
we so apprehend him that he may commu- 
nicate to us his own personal life? This is 
the crucial question of the Gospel, and an 
answer is sought to it along various lines 
of thought, (i) A peculiar importance is 
attached, in the first place, to the " words " 
of Christ, which are " spirit and life V) to 
those who truly receive them. The words 
are regarded not merely as the vehicle of a 
certain message, but as a living and per- 
sonal influence. To the ancient mode of 

62 



MAN'S RELATION TO THE LIFE-GIVER 

thinking, a man's word was part of himself. 
The word of God, more especially, is con- 
ceived in the Old Testament as the outflow 
of the divine Personality, carrying with it 
a quickening and creative power. So the 
words uttered by Jesus were a sort of efflu- 
ence from himself. Through them he makes 
his abode in the hearts of his people, and 
communicates his own life. (2) Again, a 
place is given in the Gospel to the mystical 
ideas which had already begun to grow up 
around the Lord's Supper, under the influ- 
ence of Greek and Oriental theosophy. In 
the long discourse of Jesus after the feed- 
ing of the five thousand a we have a whole 
series of sayings which can only be ex- 
plained in the light of eucharistic doctrine. 
The evangelist's attitude to this doctrine 
seems to be a twofold one. He combats 
the superstitious belief that the Supper 
was valid in itself, apart from the discern- 

1 Ch. vi. 

63 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

ment of its spiritual meaning. It can avail 
us nothing unless we can grasp the reality 
through the symbols and yield ourselves to 
Christ in the fellowship of faith. But at the 
same time a more than symbolical value is 
attributed to the sacred elements. If they 
are received with the true spirit they repre- 
sent, in some real sense, the Person of 
Christ. Only as we partake of his flesh and 
blood can we receive into ourselves the 
divine life; and by the institution of the 
Supper the great miracle is accomplished. 
Christ gives himself to us as the bread of 
life. In this sacramental train of thought, 
more distinctly than elsewhere, we can de- 
tect the semi-physical idea that is inter- 
woven with the purely spiritual teaching of 
the Gospel. Life is a divine essence, inher- 
ent in the Word made flesh; and as such it 
must be imparted magically, by a special 
miracle. (3) Once more, — and here we 
touch the centre of the Johannine message, 

64 



MAN'S RELATION TO THE LIFE-GIVER 

— life becomes ours through an inward 
abiding union with Christ, the Life-giver. 
Paul had already spoken of a fellowship 
with* Christ so entire and intimate that the 
believer became one with his Lord. "I 
live, yet not I, but Christ who liveth in me." 
The evangelist takes up this Pauline con- 
ception, and develops it, on the ground of 
his own spiritual experience, to yet fuller 
and deeper issues. Life as it manifests itself 
in the disciples is the life of Christ, apart 
from whom they can do nothing. He makes 
his abode with them and unites them to 
himself, as the branches have their life in 
the vine. The question of how this union is 
effected is left in the end unanswered; or 
rather it is answered, as alone it can be, by 
a simple judgment of faith. Those who have 
known Christ are conscious of his presence, 
beside them and within them. They are 
made one with himself, and with the Father 
through him. 



l o 



65 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

X. THE ETERNAL CHRIST 

So it is by uniting us with himself that 
Christ bestows on us his gift. The Gospel 
describes how he sojourned with his first 
disciples, and how they were quickened to 
new life by their immediate intercourse 
with the Son of God. But the thought of 
that wonderful history brings with it a great 
problem. Did the work of Christ avail only 
for the particular time and for the small 
circle of personal followers, to which he 
came? Holding as he does that life must 
be transmitted directly from the living Sav- 
iour, the evangelist may seem to have 
driven himself to this mournful conclusion. 
He cannot take refuge in any theory of the 
perennial value of Christ's message, or of 
some redeeming act performed by him once 
for all. We cannot receive the life except 
through the Person, to whom we have ac- 
cess no more. 

66 



/ 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST 

The solution to this problem is found in 
the deeper interpretation of a belief which 
held a cardinal place in primitive Christian 
theology. The early disciples, identifying 
Jesus with the Messiah of Jewish tradition, 
were confident that he would presently re- 
turn to bring in his everlasting Kingdom. 
His earthly life had closed in apparent fail- 
ure, but he would vindicate the faith of his 
people by a second coming, which would 
reveal him to the world in his true sover- 
eignty. It was this hope that sustained the 
Apostles in the face of unbelief and oppo- 
sition; but as time went on, and the Lord 
delayed his coming, the ardour of confi- 
dence gave way to doubt and disappoint- 
ment. We have evidence in the later books 
of the New Testament of the mood of de- 
pression which was beginning to chill the 
energies of the church. To the minds of not 
a few, the whole Christian message seemed 
to have fallen to the ground with the fail- 

6 7 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

ure of the great promise on which it had 
first rested. The fourth evangelist, how- 
ever, falls back on the primitive hope and 
re-affirms it, even more strenuously. He 
declares that the early disciples had only 
been mistaken as to the manner of the 
Lord's return. The promise had referred 
not to a visible advent, manifest to all the 
world, but to an inward, spiritual coming 
of which none would be aware but the 
Lord's own people. And in this sense Jesus 
had already fulfilled his promise. By his 
death he had ascended to God, re-assuming 
the glory which he had from the begin- 
ning; and his return to the Father was at 
the same time a return to his people, in a 
closer and more pervading presence. The 
"little while" of his departure was not a 
period to be measured by months or years; 
but was merely the short interval between 
his death and his Resurrection. In the 
same act by which he rose again, he had 

68 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST 

entered on his endless life; and from that 
time onward he had been dwelling with 
his people, — invisible, but even nearer to 
them, and more of a present help, than he 
had been at first. His earthly life had been 
subject to many limits and obstructions. He 
had manifested himself under the condi- 
tions of space and time. He had lived in the 
flesh, separate from his disciples, and they 
could only know him externally, as men 
know one another. His intercourse with 
them had been fitful and imperfect at the 
best, and had finally been broken off by 
death. But the limitations that had been 
placed on his first appearance had now 
fallen away, and he had returned; or rather 
he had continued, under new and larger 
conditions, the selfsame life in which he 
had been known to his disciples. We read 
in the Supper discourses how the Lord 
would henceforth reveal himself as an all- 
pervasive, inward, eternal presence. He 

6 9 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

would be near to all his people, however 
they might be scattered over the wide world. 
He would dwell with them, not outwardly 
as before, but in their very hearts. Their 
joy in his fellowship would be uninter- 
rupted by any earthly change or accident, 
and would remain the same forever. Thus 
the seeming departure of Christ had been 
only the commencement of his true and 
eternal abode with men. Those who had 
not seen, yet had believed, could hold com- 
munion with him as his own disciples had 
done, and could know him even more 
closely and personally. They could receive 
him into their hearts, and participate in 
his life. 

This doctrine of the Return of Christ is 
complicated and partly obscured by the 
references to the Holy Spirit, which alter- 
nate with it throughout the Supper dis- 
courses. Almost in the same breath in 
which he speaks of his own coming, Jesus 

70 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST 

tells his disciples of the "Comforter" or 
" Advocate" who would take his place 
after he had himself departed. In these 
allusions to the Holy Spirit we may discern 
an effort, on the part of the evangelist, to 
combine an earlier Pauline conception with 
his own characteristic thought. Paul had 
regarded the union with Christ as mediated 
by the Spirit, the new divine power which 
was now operative in the Christian Church. 
His idea of the Spirit is vitally bound up 
with his theology as a whole; but in the 
fourth Gospel it seems only to express, 
under a different form, a thought which is 
already complete in itself. The Spirit is 
another name for Christ. His promise of 
its coming is included in the greater prom- 
ise of his own personal return to his peo- 
ple. So far as an independent value can 
be attached to the doctrine of the Spirit, it 
serves to bring into special prominence 
one aspect of the abiding work of Christ. 

7i 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

He had come as the revelation of God; 
but his earthly life did not exhaust the 
revelation. There were many things which 
he desired to say to his disciples; but the 
time was short and their hearts were un- 
prepared, and he had disclosed only a 
little portion of the truth. But he be- 
queathed the Spirit to them as a perma- 
nent source of revelation. In the possession 
of it they would be guided into the hidden 
meanings of all that he had done and 
spoken. They would be enabled to read 
his past message in its bearing on new 
times and circumstances, and to develop 
it, age after age, to ever higher and larger 
issues. The Spirit, sent by him from the 
Father, would speak in his name, and its 
utterances would carry the same authority 
as his own recorded words. 

In his doctrine of the Spirit, therefore, 
the evangelist gives expression to an in- 
finitely fruitful thought, which has hardly 

72 



THE ETERNAL CHRIST 

yet come to its own in the accepted faith 
of the church. He maintains that Chris- 
tianity is not bound down to any unchange- 
able tradition or dogma. It is the absolute 
because it is the living and ever-growing 
religion. It possesses within itself an end- 
less power of development, and of re-adjust- 
ment to new conditions and needs. In each 
successive generation its message is able 
to clothe itself in changing forms; while 
through them all it remains the authentic 
message of Jesus Christ. The revelation in 
history was never meant to stand alone. 
From our knowledge, rather, of what Jesus 
was when he appeared on earth, we can 
discern him still, and receive the new 
truth which he imparts to us through his 
living Spirit. The fourth Gospel itself is 
the grandest illustration of this profound 
and far-reaching doctrine. Writing in a 
new century, for a people of alien race and 
culture, the evangelist goes back to the 

73 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

teaching of Jesus; but he does not simply 
reproduce it as it had been handed down. 
He translates it into new language; he in- 
terprets it with the aid of later theological 
forms ; he brings it into relation to contem- 
porary problems and interests, which had 
not yet emerged in the Master's own life- 
time. Literally considered the message is 
different from that which had come down 
in the tradition. The words attributed to 
Jesus had not actually fallen from his lips, 
and the whole picture of his earthly life 
and surroundings is in many respects al- 
tered. Yet the writer claims authority for 
his Gospel. He is convinced that he, as 
truly as the Synoptists, is recording the 
deeds of Jesus and the words he spoke. 
For through the historical life he has a 
vision of the eternal life. The literal teach- 
ing has been illuminated to him and filled 
with new meanings and applications. Nearly 
a century had passed by since Jesus had de- 

74 



PERMANENT VALUE OF THE GOSPEL 

parted; and through all those years his 
revelation had been unfolding itself, under 
the growing light of the world's thought 
and knowledge. This later revelation — 
the Gospel would teach us — was continu- 
ous with the first. Behind the things which 
Jesus had spoken there were those which 
he had left unsaid, and which were now 
declaring themselves to his disciples 
through his Spirit of truth. 

XL PERMANENT VALUE OF THE GOSPEL 

It would be difficult to over-estimate the 
influence of the fourth Gospel on the sub- 
sequent history of Christianity. Unlike the 
other writers of the New Testament the 
evangelist addressed himself directly to the 
Gentile church, in which the religion of 
Jesus was to find its chief fulfilment; and 
he may be said to have marked out the di- 
rection which the great stream of Christian 
thought was henceforth to follow. It was 

75 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

due in large measure to the influence of 
his Gospel that Christianity remained true 
to its original character, amidst the many 
disturbing forces of the second and third 
centuries. At a time when the primitive 
tradition was in danger of perishing, this 
great teacher re-asserted it, and embodied 
it in new and living forms. He gathered 
up into one final utterance the whole mes- 
sage of the Apostolic Age. The Synoptic 
history, the theology of Paul, the hopes 
and beliefs of the early disciples were all 
harmoniously blended in his Gospel, and 
became the lasting inheritance of the Gen- 
tile church. It must never be forgotten 
that the primary aim of our evangelist was 
to maintain the faith as it had been at the 
beginning. From the age immediately be- 
hind him he received the message of the 
Apostles, and sought to bring it home, as 
a saving power, to his own generation. 
But in the very effort to preserve what was 

7 6 



PERMANENT VALUE OF THE GOSPEL 

essential in it, he was led to introduce cer- 
tain new elements, which profoundly af- 
fected all the later development. 

(i) He availed himself of categories of 
thought, unknown to the primitive age, 
which were derived mainly from the phi- 
losophy of Greece. These new categories 
were in many ways well fitted to express 
Christian ideas ; but it cannot be denied that 
something was lost by the adoption of them. 
The teaching of Jesus became abstract and 
mystical, instead of simple and direct. An 
appeal was made to the intellect more than 
to the underlying instincts of the moral and 
religious life. The loss, however, was coun- 
ter-balanced by undoubted gains. Chris- 
tianity was now enabled to present itself to 
the Western peoples under forms of thought 
and language which they could understand. 
Not only so, but it was brought into alli- 
ance with new forces that worked hence- 
forth for its enrichment. It asserted itself 

77 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

heir to five centuries of Greek thinking. It 
was acclimatised in the general culture of 
the time, and penetrated it more and more 
with its own spirit. To the fourth evan- 
gelist, more than to any other teacher, the 
church was indebted for the mighty pro- 
gress of the next three centuries. He trans- 
planted the new religion from its Jewish 
soil into another, where it could take deep 
root and send out its branches freely. 

(2) The early apocalyptic ideas were 
changed, in the fourth Gospel, into their 
spiritual equivalents. This was a great and 
necessary change, the full importance of 
which we are just beginning to realise, in 
the light of a better knowledge of the New 
Testament times. The members of the 
primitive church were unable to grasp the 
message of Christ apart from certain beliefs 
which they had inherited from Judaism. 
They looked for an approaching end of the 
world, for a visible coming of the Messiah 

78 



PERMANENT VALUE OF THE GOSPEL 

on the clouds of heaven, for a literal Day of 
Judgment. Even Paul, while he discarded 
the Jewish legalism, held firmly to those 
apocalyptic conceptions; and his teaching 
has constantly to be disentangled from them 
before we can understand its real import. 
In the fourth Gospel, however, the great 
Christian ideas are set before us in their 
purity. They are no longer involved in those 
wrappings of myth and imagination which 
in course of time might have smothered 
them altogether. The dramatic advent of the 
Messiah becomes the return of Jesus as an 
inward presence with his people. The judg- 
ment ceases to be a definite event in the 
future, and is conceived as something pres- 
ent and always in process, — a continual 
sifting out of men by their attitude to the 
light. By this dissolving of the old apoca- 
lyptic hopes, the evangelist broke away 
from much that was characteristic of earlier 
Christianity; but in so doing he only af- 

79 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

firmed more clearly the essential Christian 
message. It was preserved for the time to 
come in its true character, as inward and 
spiritual. 

(3) The evangelist made it evident, once 
for all, that the central fact in Christianity 
is the Person of Christ. No doubt he pre- 
sents this great truth under doctrinal forms 
which belonged to a given age, and have 
now in large measure lost their value. It 
might be argued that the whole attempt to 
construe the Person of Christ theologically 
was a mistaken one, and tended to divert 
the church from its true mission. An ortho- 
dox belief came to be the one criterion of 
the religious life. Christian thought ex- 
hausted itself in endless efforts — futile by 
their very nature — to define the mystery of 
the Godhead, and the precise relation be- 
tween the Father and the Son. For much 
of the fruitless controversy of the succeed- 
ing centuries the fourth evangelist must 

80 



PERMANENT VALUE OF THE GOSPEL 

be held responsible. But the controversy, 
however misdirected in itself, had behind 
it the great conviction which he had be- 
queathed to the Christian Church. Christ, in 
his own Person, is the revelation. Through 
knowledge of him and participation in his 
spirit, we have access to God. 

The value of the fourth Gospel, how- 
ever, is not to be measured by its historical 
influence on the faith and development of 
the church. It holds a place of its own, 
— sacred and apart even among the books 
of the New Testament, — as the devotional 
Gospel, which has moulded and nurtured 
the Christian piety of all ages. The tradi- 
tion which assigns it to a Beloved Disciple 
is true in essence, if not in literal fact. We 
can recognise in the unknown evangelist 
one who had entered into the inner secret 
of the life of Christ. He has taught us, out 
of his own deep experience, how the Mas- 
ter who departed long ago is still a living 

81 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL 

presence with those who love him; and 
Christian men have ever found in his Gos- 
pel the largest and tenderest expression of 
their personal faith. The language they 
have learned from it comes naturally to 
their hearts, when they hold their own 
communion with Christ. 

The ultimate purpose of the Gospel was 
this which it has fulfilled, in ampler meas- 
ure than the evangelist could dream of. He 
wrote a "spiritual Gospel," which should 
not merely record the facts of history, but 
should interpret them in their inward and 
abiding reality. He saw that the life which 
had once been manifest for a little time in 
a remote land, was the revelation of God; 
and he sought to detach it from all that was 
transient and accidental, and show forth its 
meaning for all time. Jesus who lived and 
died, was the Son of God. He is still pres- 
ent with his people; and those who have 
not seen yet have believed, may hold fel- 

82 



PERMANENT VALUE OF THE GOSPEL 

lowship with him and have life through 
his name. It is true that in this endeavour 
to portray Jesus, in his earthly ministry, as 
the ever-living Christ, the evangelist has 
modified and idealised the facts. As a work 
of history his Gospel is secondary to the 
Synoptic records; and its evidence must 
always be sifted and controlled by means 
of them. Yet it possesses an inestimable 
value even for the history. We cannot un- 
derstand what Jesus was, while he yet so- 
journed among men, until we learn to see 
him, with the fourth evangelist, in the 
eternal significance of his life. 



@fce fttoergibe J&re&$ 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



MODERN 

RELIGIOUS 

PROBLEMS 



EDITED BY 

DR. AMBROSE W. VERNON 



For a long time there has been an atmosphere of 
uncertainty in the religious realm. This uncertainty 
has been caused by the widespread knowledge that 
modern scholarship has modified the traditional con- 
ceptions of the Christian religion, and particularly by 
widespread ignorance of the precise modifications to 
which modern scholarship has been led. 

The aim of this series of books is to lay before the 
great body of intelligent people in the English-speak- 
ing world the precise results of this scholarship, so 
that men both within and without the churches may 
be able to understand the conception of the Christian 
religion (and of its Sacred Books) which obtains 
among its leading scholars to-day, and that they may 
intelligently cooperate in the great practical problems 
with which the churches are now confronted. 

While at many a point divergent views are cham- 
pioned, it has become apparent in the last few years 
that it is possible to speak of a consensus of opinion 
among the leading scholars of England and America, 
who have, in general, adopted the modern point of 
view. 



The publishers and editor congratulate themselves 
that this consensus of opinion may be presented to 
the public not by middle -men, but by men who from 
their position and attainment are recognized through- 
out the English Protestant world as among those best 
able to speak with authority on the most important 
subjects which face intelligent religious men to-day. 
It is a notable sign of the times that these eminent 
specialists have gladly consented to pause in their de- 
tailed research, in order to acquaint the religious 
public with the results of their study. 

Modern Religious Problems are many, but they 
fall chiefly under one of the four divisions into which 
this series of books is to be divided : — 

I. The Old Testament. 
II. The New Testament. 

III. Fundamental Christian Conceptions. 

IV. Practical Church Problems. 

Under these four main divisions the most vital 
problems will be treated in short, concise, clear vol- 
umes. They will leave technicalities at one side and 
they will be published at a price which will put the 
assured results of religious scholarship within the 
reach of all. 

The volumes already arranged for are the following : 

I. OLD TESTAMENT 

"THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
LAW." By Canon S. R. DRIVER, Oxford University. 

"HOW WE GOT OUR OLD TESTAMENT." 

By Professor WILLIAM R. ARNOLD, Andover Semin- 
ary. 

*THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF ISRAEL." 

By Professor L. B. PATON, Hartford Theological Semim- 
ary. 



II. NEW TESTAMENT 

"THE EARLIEST SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF 
JESUS." By Professor F. C. BURKITT, Cambridge Uni- 
versity, England. (In Press.) 

"THE MIRACLES OF JESUS." 

By Professor F. C. PORTER, Yale University. 

"THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH." 

By Professor B. W. BACON, Yale University. (Now 
Ready.) 

"HOW WE GOT OUR NEW TESTAMENT." 
By Professor J. H. ROPES, Harvard University. 

"PAUL AND PAULINISM." 

By Rev. JAMES MOFFATT, D. D., Broughty Ferry, 
Forfarshire, Scotland. 

"THE HISTORICAL AND RELIGIOUS VALUE OF 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL." By Professor E. F. SCOTT, 
Queen's University, Kingston. (In Press.) 

III. FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIAN 
CONCEPTIONS 

"THE GOSPEL OF JESUS." 

By Professor G. W. KNOX, Union Theological Seminary. 
New York. With General Introduction to the Series. (Now 
Ready.) 

"THE GOD OF THE CHRISTIAN." 

By Professor A. C. McGIFFERT, Union Theological Sem- 
inary. 

"SIN AND ITS FORGIVENESS." 

By President WILLIAM DeW. HYDE, Bowdoin College. 
(Now Ready.) 

'THE PERSON OF JESUS." 

By President H. C. KING, Oberlin College. 

"THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCRIPTURES." 

By Professor SHAILER MATHEWS, University of Chi- 
cago. 



IV. PRACTICAL CHURCH PROBLEMS 

•'THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN MODERN 
SOCIETY." By WM. JEWETT TUCKER, Ex-Presi- 
dent of Dartmouth College. 

"THE CHURCH AND LABOR." 

By CHARLES STELZLE, Superintendent of Department 
of the Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church of the 
United States. 

"THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE BIBLE SCHOOLS 
TO MODERN NEEDS." By Professor CHARLES F. 
KENT, Yale University. 

"THE CHURCH AND THE CHILD." 

By Rev. HENRY SLOANE COFFIN, Madison Ave. 
Presbyterian Church, New York City. 

The general editor of the series, Rev. Ambrose 
White Vernon, is a graduate of Princeton University 
(1891) and of Union Theological Seminary (1894). 
After two years more of study in Germany, on a fel- 
lowship, he had an experience of eight years in the 
pastorate, at Hiawatha, Kansas, and East Orange, 
New Jersey. From 1904 to 1907 he was professor of 
Biblical literature in Dartmouth College, and then 
professor of practical theology at Yale till the present 
year, when he returned to the pastorate, succeeding 
the late Dr. Reuen Thomas at Harvard Church, 
Brookline, one of the leading churches of metropoli- 
tan Boston. Dartmouth College gave him the de- 
gree of D. D. in 1907. 

The volumes are attractively bound in cloth. Thin 
i2mo, each 30 cents net. Postage J cents, 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
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